raptures, at odds.

Currently, I'm sitting on the couch in a house with a couple who are in their late 60s/early 70s - tonight is her first night home, after several weeks in the hospital for diagnosis and treatment of some serious medical issues.

I walked in the door after a late night at work, about thirty minutes ago, and found rooms empty, empty recliner rocking slightly, the air tense under the high pitch of a muted TV - signs of life, no inhabitants. Chuckled briefly, to recall churchy childhood cautionary tales of raptured believers, empty houses, abandoned rocking chairs still warmed from the sanctified pressure of saved behinds.

I walked to the back of the house and, on a hunch, peeked into one of the spare bedrooms, where I found the husband standing in the dark, at his wife's bedside, hands on hips, shoulders high. She's not doing too good. He didn't turn to face me. What do you mean? She's pukey, and freezing. Otherwise alive. He chuckled, shoulders still high.

She murmured something, and he replied, "Lisa just got here. I told her you're nauseous and ice cold. Because you are." She sighed from the bed - a tiny gray figure swallowed up in a king-sizer filled and covered with cushions, quilts, her favorite fuzzy blankets. I asked if they needed anything, needed me to make a grocery run, do you have ginger ale? yes, I got some earlier. 

We all hovered there in silence. Her husband stirred a bit and muttered something about getting a chair to sit in the room with her. For a half-second, as I moved aside to let him pass, I was transfixed by his eyes - brighter than I'd seen them in weeks, equally deeply-concerned and almost-gleefully relieved to have her home, after weeks of chafing at the walls of an empty house that barely breathed without her -  fixing the bathtub faucet, cleaning his garage workbench, sorting towels - fixing her any way he could. Eating, without heckling, yet without much pleasure, illicit Sugar Smacks and potato chips she tried to forbid, for his health. Ready and so eager to return to the rhythms of arguing, and irritation, and macaroni and cheese with tomatoes, and peace, and talk, and the rapture of being with, after having been departed from, temporarily.

The last time I walked past, he was sitting in the dark, in the rocking chair he'd brought to the foot of her bed. If she were in a good state, she'd protest his hovering with genuine irritation bordering on anger; he knows it.

If I ever find love, this is the love I want.